Testing period

Diet and Housing:
Animals consumed Purina 5K52 food and
standard acidified drinking water for the whole project. They were housed in a high health
status room from age 7 weeks in Thoren cages (Thoren Maxi Miser #3 cages with a PIV
(pressurized individually ventilated) system).
More info.

Acclimatization:
Animals were housed 5 per cage
and acclimatized for 1 to 2 weeks before training and testing.

Testing: At 9 weeks of age the animals were trained daily for one week on the Visitech
BP2000 equipment. Blood pressure and pulse were recorded (20 readings daily) using the tail
cuff method but these results were labeled "training" and not used for statistical
calculations. The next week, the animals were tested daily for one week taking 20 readings
each day. More info.

Prior testing: No prior phenotyping was done during this study.

Data reduction: Mean and Standard deviation were calculated for only the "data day"
reading taken during the second week of testing (total of 100 reading, 20 per day). Data
rejection criteria were:

Individual data points were rejected if the Blood pressure was below 40.

Individual data points were rejected if the Blood pressure was over 210.

Individual data points were rejected if, on any one day, it was outside of 2 standard deviations from the mean.

All the data for a day was rejected if there were less than 8 valid readings.

Data for a week was not accepted if it did not have at least 3 acceptable days of measurements.